Blogger: Aggie Rothon, Communications Officer
Why do certain images stay with you? It seems obvious why memories of important events and meaningful people are filed away for a lifetimes musing upon, but why do some things remain lodged in your memory even though they have little or no relevance to everyday life?
This occurred to me the other day when, out of the blue, the image of something I must have seen once, as a little girl, flashed in to my conscious mind. And not for the first time. I have remembered this image time and again over the years but I haven’t until now, given any time to wondering why this might be.
The image I keep remembering is of an old fashioned bus on display at the Aylsham Show. The dark red bus had been converted so that one side opened up fully to display an organ that played by itself some rather wheezy and strained children’s rhymes. It had been parked on it’s own amidst an otherwise crowded showground and energetically pumped out it’s music to a non-existent audience. Why do I keep remembering the bus? Perhaps it’s something about labouring for no return.
The bus came to mind this time round having had a rather strange experience walking from our house in Sloley to our friends in Worstead. As we strode down the undulations of Broad Road and in to the shade of the beech copse wrapped the length of the final hill I heard a bird calling very loudly and exotically in the under storey to my side. I didn’t need to search for the perpetrator for he was entirely obvious.
A great silver and black tail quivered with the bird’s every step and his midnight blue back shone with an oily metallic green sheen. Silver scale like plumes scalloped with black fanned out over his neck stopping only at his bright yellow and brick red back. The bird crowed ecstatically, to whom I am still unsure. Perhaps the usual grey-brown pheasant hens that scurry hither and thither from roadside to field margin; or perhaps just to himself, like that dark red singing bus that I still remember.
I think this enthusiastic interloper was a Lady Amherst’s pheasant. From where he came I have no idea, but there is a small British population of the birds living feral in our woodlands. Did anybody else see him?
So perhaps I have found out why the mystical singing bus keeps reappearing in my mind’s eye. It’s about feeling out of place or seeing things out of context. This pheasant would be far more at home on the wooded bamboo slopes of China. As for the singing bus, I’m not sure where it belongs!
As featured in the EDP, Saturday 20 January